However, although hybrid drives canвЂ™t break the rules, theyвЂ™re engineered to bend the hell of out of them.Д«ending the rules begins with a handful of NAND Flash memory incorporated into the hybrid drive. The vast majority of a hybrid driveвЂ™s capacity consists of the same platters found in traditional hard drives, and no amount of technological fairy dust will make them inordinately faster. HereвЂ™s the rub: Hybrid drives arenвЂ™t able to ferry around all of their data at speeds that strain the SATA bus (like modern SSDs can). Who wouldnвЂ™t want a gargantuan hard drive with the ability to read and write data at the speed of a SSD? A product like that practically sells itself. вЂњSolid stateвЂќ are the two words that sell a SSHD, because of the underlying premise that solid-state storage leaves magnetic storage in the dust on the test track. But as storage has evolved to a two-party system, do hybrid drives have a compelling enough platform to warrant attention?

They take a little from column A and a little from column B in an attempt to be an intriguing compromise candidate. Solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) occupy the middle ground between hard drives and solid-state drives. What happens when you cross a HDD with a SSD? No, this isnвЂ™t a setup for the nerdiest, storage-related joke. Those fast SSDs continue picking up speed, but it can be hard to justify the cost, especially when compared to an HDD. Hard drives are still the best source of cheap gigabytes, but theyвЂ™re undeniably slower than solid-state drives. While we can spend hours scrutinizing and debating the distinctions between a pair of SSDs, nearly everyone knows the differences between HDDs and SSDs in broad strokes.

If you have a cursory understanding of storage technologies, odds are you know that hard disk drives and solid state drives are not the same.

Best hybrid hard drive